Japanese Come To Sanford For Farming Tips

The Delegation Studied How The Agriculture Extension Service Works With Seminole Growers.

September 10, 1992|By Elaine Bennett of The Sentinel Staff

SANFORD — Three Japanese agronomists came to Seminole County last week on a tour to gather farming ideas to adopt halfway around the world.

Before coming to Sanford, they harvested tobacco on farms in North Carolina and Tennessee. They plan a stop in California before heading home.

In Sanford Thursday, they met with Uday Yadav, director of the extension service offices at the Seminole County Agriculture Center.

Through an interpreter, the representatives from Japan Tobacco Inc., Okinawa, explained that their visit to the United States was to study new tobacco cultivation techniques and to learn how the agriculture extension service works with farmers.

During the two-hour meeting, they said Japanese and American farmers face similar problems growing tobacco, especially with pests, stringent environmental regulations, labor shortages and high costs for farmland.

Yadav and the Japanese visitors also took time to discuss the decline in farming in both countries, as well as a decrease in farming interests by today's youth, who prefer higher paying office jobs in large corporations to growing crops.

Unlike the United States, Japan has placed less emphasis on health-related problems associated with smoking, the visitors said.

That, however, is changing.

The men explained that recently they have seen more and more public and private businesses prohibiting visitors and employees from smoking in their buildings.

About a year ago, a group of Japanese advisers to the Shizuoka Federation of Agricultural Cooperatives also visited Sanford and toured celery fields and citrus groves in Seminole and Orange counties.

Their visit to Florida came at the end of a 15-day stay in the United States to broaden their knowledge of agriculture in hopes of improving farming methods in Japan.